In Vanity Fair’s October issue, Sarah Ellison reports that Julian Assange contacted Benedict Cumberbatch late last year in attempt to dissuade the English actor from portraying him in Bill Condon’s WikiLeaks film,The Fifth Estate. This morning, during a round table conversation for the film, which premiered last night in Toronto, Cumberbatch shed more light on his communications with Assange.

“I tried to justify my reasons for doing the project,” Cumberbatch explained when we asked him about the nature of their conversations and how they informed his performance. Asked whether he considered backing out of the project at any point during their correspondence, the actor said, “It mattered to me a lot that he felt so passionately. I wanted to persuade him that [Cumberbatch’s portrayal] was not necessarily going to be as bad as he feared it would be from the script he’d had leaked to him, which was a very old draft. I don’t think I had [even] seen it.” Benedict confirmed that the conversation lasted over the course of a few e-mails, “and that is where it ended.” Ellison writes in her feature this month that Cumberbatch tried to meet with Assange, an Australian national who is currently in exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, but that Assange declined the invitation.

(Later this morning, Bill Condon told us that he had hoped Assange would warm to the project after Cumberbatch had been cast, since both Condon and Cumberbatch have friends who visit him at the Ecuadorian Embassy regularly. Alas, Assange did not want to “legitimize” the project with his support.)

One insider who proved more helpful: Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the WikiLeaks defector whose book,Inside WikiLeaks, was optioned as inspiration for The Fifth Estate. During a different conversation this morning, Daniel Brühl, the German actor who portrays Domscheit-Berg in the film, said that Domscheit-Berg spent four days explaining his book, the ins and outs of the organization, and “his intense relationship with Julian.” “I did not have any reason to not believe in his integrity,” Brühl added. “It was easy for me to portray him.”

Even without Assange’s input, the controversial WikiLeaks founder does manage to have the last word in the film. After two title cards bring viewers up-to-date on Assange’s current housing situation and the sexual-assualt allegations he faces in Sweden, Benedict Cumberbatch appears for a confessional-style cutaway. In character as Assange, he jokes about the possibility of a movie about him: “The WikiLeaks movie?” he asks, before deadpanning, “More like the anti-WikiLeaks movie.”